• 

  Bad is good: Manil Suri

Why Indians are good at bad sex

Imagine you are a student of mathematics at, say, Presidency College, and wander into class because your professor will today teach a topic especially close to your heart —'numerical analysis of partial differential equations'.

Then you are pleasantly shocked to discover that 'Sir' is a lot more interesting than you thought at first. He spends his nights writing about sex — and bizarre sex at that.

Here he is describing a sex scene involving the three main protagonists — Karun, a physicist in Mumbai, his wife Sarita and a young gay male Muslim — in a novel that he has written.

Comparing sex to a nuclear reaction, he writes: 'Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands — only Karun's body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.'

You don't know what the hell Sir means except that all this sounds deliciously filthy. You decide to buy Sir's novel and look up all the dirty bits.

This exact situation faces students of Manil Suri, maths professor at the University of Maryland. The extract from his new novel, The City of Devi, won him the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award in London last week.

The award was instituted in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh, editor of the Literary Review, to 'draw attention to crude, badly written, or perfunctory use of passages of sexual description in contemporary novels — and to discourage it'.

Suri, whose previous novels in his trilogy are The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva, did not come personally from America to collect his prize from the actress Joan Collins.

'My one chance to meet Joan Collins, and I blew it!' he quipped.

Some psychiatrists suggest that Indians are sexually such a frustrated lot that they pour their passions into prose.

Writing engagingly about sex isn't easy but here is a tip from Joan's novelist sister, Jackie Collins, acknowledged mistress of the bonkbuster: 'I like to think I write erotic sex as opposed to rude sex. Some writers spell out every detail as if they sideline as a gynaecologist. That's not for me. I want to turn my readers on — not off. I try to take them so far, then allow their own sexual fantasies to take over.'

Suri's prize was accepted by a representative of his publisher, Bloomsbury, who saucily invited the 400 guests at the gala dinner to 'take The City of Devi home to bed with you tonight'.

Bunker boy

• 

  Pioneering prose: Aniruddha Bahal

Manil Suri is not the first Indian winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction award. That honour belongs to the journalist Aniruddha Bahal, whom I remember meeting in 2003 after he had won with his novel, Bunker 13.

This was the passage the judges deemed particularly 'cringeworthy': 'Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed.... She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time... She picks up a Bugatti's momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen's steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she's eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion.'

In halcyon times in 1999 Bahal helped Tarun Tejpal set up the Tehelka news website — and a number of stings.

Maths movie

• 

  Also playing: Jeremy Irons as G.H. Hardy

Another Indian mathematician is in the news — Srinivasa Ramanujan whose life is being turned into a movie.

He will be played by the 23-year-old actor Dev Patel, of Slumdog Millionaire fame.

Meanwhile, the role of G.H. Hardy, the leading mathematician of his day who collaborated with Ramanujan on many projects between 1914 and 1919, has gone to the British actor, Jeremy Irons, 65.

The screenplay is based on Robert Kanigel's biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan — I was delighted to find my copy after hunting around for half an hour.

Edward R. Pressman and Prashita Chaudhary of Cinemorphic are producers of the film, which will be directed by Matthew Brown, who has also written the screenplay.

Ramanujan came from Madras to Cambridge in 1914 at the age of 27 and, though untutored, collaborated on many projects with Hardy. In 1918 Ramanujan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and the first Indian to be made a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Suffering from poor health and TB, Ramanujan returned to Madras in 1919 and died the following year at the age of only 32.

Hardy was an atheist while Ramanujan, a strict vegetarian, was a devout Tamilian Brahmin of the Thenkalai Iyengar sect.

It is said Ramanujan claimed his Goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal, appeared in his dreams and helpfully dictated the theorems he subsequently jotted down.

So this dialogue might not be inappropriate:

Hardy: 'This theorem is incredible! How did you even think of it, Ram?'

Ramanujan: 'It was too easy, Hardy. Namakkal told me what to put down. Yoghurt?'

Spiritual hero

While in prison Nelson Mandela had access to Shakespeare plays but the book covers had Diwali cards pasted on them to fool the guards — 'Hindu Gods protecting Shakespeare,' someone has quipped.

That the news of his death was announced on Thursday evening while a film of his life was being premiered in London will bring a wry smile to Shekhar Kapur.

In 2003, it was announced that Morgan Freeman, then 65, would play the lead in a movie directed by Shekhar, with the script, based then as now, on Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.

Alas, it didn't happen. A satisfactory script never got written until 10 years later by which time Shekhar's time had come and gone. The current film is directed by Justin Chadwick, with a screenplay by William Nicholson and Idris Elba cast as Mandela.

I have a note of Shekhar from 2003 describing Mandela: 'He is a spiritual hero like Gandhi. He does not need to fight a bloody battle in order to win.'

Helping hand

• 

  LONDON DROWNING: A nightmarish vision

It is hard to conceive of London drowning but the Thames Barrier was closed to protect us from possible disaster on Thursday as the east coast braced itself for the biggest tidal surge for 30 years. What could happen in London was visualised in the nightmarish 2007 film, Flood.

Forecasters warned that sea levels could reach the heights seen during the devastating floods of 1953 which left 307 people dead. The authorities insist that London's Thames estuary defences will keep the capital safe.

Now that I have been assured that David Cameron wants to do business with Mamata Banerjee, perhaps the British could help build similar defences to protect Calcutta from a possible tsunami.

Tittle tattle

England's desperation at the Adelaide Oval was evident in this tweet from Joe Wilson of BBC Sport: 'If you are waking up in the UK it's been a day of wildly varying fortunes for Australian batsmen — sometimes they've scored 4s, other times 6s.'